Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

  This is further proof that in this country people no longer feel that the country’s territory belongs to them, to the citizenry. These people no longer feel like citizens. They feel themselves to be a mass of automatons. They don’t even feel that the forest that comes up right to their house belongs to them. I even doubt that they feel that they own their own home. Because if an excavator drives up to their door and these people are told that they have to evacuate the premises because, sorry, we are razing your house and building a residence for a bureaucrat, these people will humbly collect their things, pack their bags, and go out into the street. And they will sit out there in the street right up until the moment when the authorities tell them what to do next. They are totally spineless. This is very sad.

  I have been in jail for almost six months, and I have realized that jail is Russia in miniature. You can start with the management: it’s the same power vertical, where action is possible only when the boss himself intervenes. There is no horizontal distribution of responsibility, though this would make everyone’s life a lot easier. There is no such thing as individual initiative. Snitching and mutual distrust are endemic. Just like in the country as a whole, in pretrial detention everything is done to dehumanize the individual, to turn him into a function, be it the function of an inmate or a guard. One quickly gets used to the restrictive daily routine because it resembles the restricted routine of life to which a person is subjected from birth. People start to treasure the little things. In jail it’s things like a tablecloth or plastic dishes, which can only be procured with the personal permission of the boss. Out of jail, it’s standing in society that people treasure just as much, and this is something I, for one, have never understood.

  One more thing: the regime is a show that conceals what in reality is chaos. What looks orderly and restrictive is in fact disorganized and inefficient. Obviously, this does not lead to order. On the contrary, people feel acutely lost, in time and space among other things. As everywhere in the country, a person does not know where to go with a particular problem. So he goes to the head of the detention facility. That’s like taking your problem to Putin outside of jail.

  When we describe the system in our lyrics—

  I guess you could say we are not really opposed—

  We are in opposition to Putinist chaos, which is a regime in name only.

  When we describe the system in our lyrics, we aim to convey our opinion that virtually all institutions are mutating, that while outwardly they remain intact, civil society, which we value so highly, is being destroyed, yet we do not make a direct statement. We merely utilize the form of a direct statement. We use it as an art form. The only thing that remains identical is motivation. Our motivation is identical to the motivation of a speaker making a direct statement. This motivation is described very well in the Gospels: “For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” I believe and we all believe that the door will be opened to us. But, alas, for now we have been shut in jail. It is very strange that in reacting to our actions, the authorities neglected to take into account the history of dissident expression.

  “Woe unto the country where simple honesty is perceived as an act of heroism at best and a mental disorder at worst,” wrote the dissident [Vladimir] Bukovsky in the 1970s. Not much time has passed, but it’s like there was no Great Terror and no efforts to oppose it. I believe we stand accused by people who have no memory.

  Many of them have said, “He is possessed by a demon and insane. Why do you listen to Him?” Those were words spoken by Jews who accused Jesus Christ of blasphemy. They said, “We are stoning you for blasphemy” [John 10:33]. It’s remarkable that it is this verse that the Russian Orthodox Church uses to express its own view of blasphemy. This view has been put down on paper and admitted into evidence as part of the case against us. In expressing this view the Russian Orthodox Church cites the Gospels as static religious truth. The Gospels are no longer seen as the revelations they were from the beginning. They are seen as a monolith that can be broken up into quotes to be stuffed anywhere, into any document, used for any purpose whatsoever. The Russian Orthodox Church did not even bother to look at the context in which the word blasphemy was used—and did not note that in this particular case it was applied to Jesus Christ.

  I believe that religious truth cannot be static. I believe it is essential to understand that contradiction and splintering are inherent to the development of the spirit. That these things must be lived through as an individual is shaped. That religious truth is a process and not a product that can be stuffed just anywhere. Art and philosophy strive to make sense of all the things, all the processes I have mentioned. That includes contemporary art. The artistic situation can and, I think, should contain its own internal conflict. And I am very irritated that the prosecution refers to contemporary art as “so-called art.”

  I would like to note that the same expression was used in the trial of the poet [Joseph] Brodsky.[8] His poetry was referred to as “so-called poetry” and the witnesses who testified against him had not read it. Just as some of those who testified against us did not witness what happened but only saw the video on the Internet.

  In the collective prosecutorial mind our apologies are also apparently characterized as “so-called.” Though I find this insulting. It causes me suffering and moral harm. Because our apologies were sincere. I am so sad that we have said so many words and you have not understood any of them. Or are you lying when you talk of our apologies as though they were insincere? I don’t understand: What more do you need to hear? For me, only this trial can rightly be referred to as “so-called.” And I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of lies and fictions and of poorly coded deception in the verdict of this so-called court, because all you can do is take away my so-called freedom, the only sort that exists in the Russian Federation. But no one can take away my inner freedom. It lives in my words and it will survive thanks to the public nature of my statements, which will be heard and read by thousands. This freedom is already multiplying, thanks to every caring person who hears us in this country. Thanks to everyone who has found splinters of this trial in themselves, as Franz Kafka and Guy Debord once did. I believe that openness and public speech and a hunger for the truth make us all a little bit freeer.

  We will see this yet.

  The courtroom applauded again. A marshal blew up: “Keep your emotions to yourself! You were all told this.” Then came Kat.

  In their closing statements people are usually expected either to repent or to express regret for what they have done, or to list extenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the cases of my colleagues in the band, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I would like to share my thoughts about the reasons what happened to us has happened.

  Ever since Vladimir Putin’s former colleague Kirill Gundyaev became the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, most thinking people in this country have known that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior has turned into an important symbol of political strategy. After this, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior started to be used as a colorful interior for the politics of the uniformed forces, which hold most of the power.

  Why did Putin have to use the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics at all? He could instead have used the more secular instruments of authority, such as the state corporations or his frightful police force or his pliable judicial system. It’s possible that the failed hard-line politics of the Putin project, including the sinking of the Kursk submarine, the explosions that claimed the lives of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant episodes of his political career have made him think about recusing himself before the citizens of Russia decide to help him along in this. This must be when he decided he needed to have more convincing, transcendental guarantees of staying in power in Russia for a long time. This is when the need for using the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, with its historical connection to the best times of the Russian empire, when
authority was derived not from such earthly expressions as democratic elections and civil society but from God himself.

  But how did he manage this, considering the state is supposed to be secular and any intersection of the religious and political spheres is meant to be curtailed by society, which is always on guard and thinking critically?

  I guess the authorities were exploiting a certain absence of the Orthodox aesthetic in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had an air of lost history about it, something suppressed and harmed by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and that made it part of the culture of the opposition. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical sense of loss and present their new political project of restoring the lost spiritual values of Russia, which had a rather vague relationship to any sincere concern for preserving Orthodox history and culture. Logically enough, the Russian Orthodox Church, which has a longstanding mystical connection to the state, became the main agent of this project in the media. It was also decided that the Russian Orthodox Church should counteract all the detrimental influences of contemporary mass culture, with its concepts of diversity and tolerance, as opposed to the Soviet period, when the Church mainly opposed the violence done by the authorities against history itself.

  This political project, interesting as it was from a variety of standpoints, required a large amount of multi-ton professional lighting and video equipment, air time on the central television channel for live broadcasts lasting many hours, and, subsequently, many more hours of filming for news stories aimed at reinforcing the moral fabric by means of transmitting the patriarch’s seamless speeches, meant to help believers make the right choice at this difficult time in Putin’s life, before the election. The filming had to be ongoing, the necessary images had to be burned into memory and continuously renewed, creating the impression of something that is natural, permanent, and nonnegotiable.

  Our sudden musical appearance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with our song “Mother of God, Chase Putin Out” disturbed the integrity of this media image, created by the authorities over time, and exposed its falsehood. Without securing the patriarch’s blessing, we dared in our performance to combine the visual images of Orthodox culture and the culture of protest, making intelligent people suspect that Orthodox culture may belong not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the patriarch, and Putin: it can end up on the side of civil riot and the protest culture in Russia. It is possible that the unpleasant large-scale effect of our media intrusion into the cathedral surprised the authorities themselves. At first they tried to portray our performance as a prank by a bunch of soulless militant atheists. But they missed the mark by a lot because by this time we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that commits media attacks on the country’s main political symbols. In the end, after they had appraised all the irreversible political and symbolic losses brought on by our innocent art, the authorities decided after all to protect society from us and our nonconformist way of thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

  I have mixed feelings right now about this trial. On one hand, we are expecting a guilty verdict now. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The entire world can see now that the case against us is trumped up. The system cannot hide the repressive nature of this trial. Yet again the world sees Russia not as Vladimir Putin tries to present it in his daily international meetings. None of the steps he has promised to take toward a rule-of-law society have actually been taken. And his declaration that the court in our case will be objective and will announce a just decision is yet another lie told to the whole country and the world. That’s all. Thank you.

  The judge scheduled the sentencing for August 17, eight days later. Nadya, Maria, and Kat spent those days back in pretrial detention, going over all the signs. The prosecutor had asked for three years, but some of the victims’ lawyers had asked for a suspended sentence. Plus, Putin had said the sentence should not be too harsh. All of this pointed to a suspended sentence. On the other hand, Mark Feigin, who had grown glum right after the probable-cause hearing and never really recovered, had talked about a possible sentence of a year and a half. But he had also said he would petition to have the three women kept in pretrial detention if the sentence was that short—short?—and they could work in the same jail where they were now, perhaps in the kitchen or, better yet, the library. This seemed like a good option to Kat, though Maria and Nadya were thinking they might prefer a prison colony to the cramped monotony of jail. And then again, Volkova had mentioned that hooliganism was the kind of offense that, if you were found guilty, always got you three years of real time. That could happen too. It had clearly happened to a lot of other people.

  ———

  THE CROWD GATHERED in front of the courthouse on August 17 looked happy. It was a sunny day, and the faces in the crowd were so good, so familiar, that it seemed nothing terrible could happen. Back when people used to come to the courthouse for arrest hearings, someone—perhaps it was Petya—had coined the term cultural festival to replace protest or vigil. It had been forgotten since, but now the atmosphere actually felt festive. There was music, some people held up witty signs, and an occasional balaclava could be glimpsed. Orthodox believers were there too, with their signs, but, being clearly outnumbered by Pussy Riot supporters, they looked like bad actors playing themselves and not at all scary.

  The judge began reading the verdict just after three. It was “guilty,” which surprised no one, but, following the tradition of Russian courts, the judge would plow through a tedious recounting of most testimony heard and evidence reviewed in the course of the trial before announcing the sentence; it could take hours. Some of the people in the crowd tuned their phones to radio stations that had reporters in the courthouse and stuck earphones in their ears; clumps of people convened around these listeners, looking at them expectantly, as though something depended on being first to hear the news.

  “In sum, and in light of the danger to society caused by the offense committed, as well as the circumstances of the crime and its goals and motives,” the judge said just before six in the evening, “the court believes that justice can be served and the defendants can be reformed only if they are sentenced to time behind bars and are ordered to actually serve this time.”

  “Two years,” said the people with headphones throughout the crowd.

  “Two years,” the entire crowd sighed at once.

  A shadow fell over hundreds of faces. The festivities were over. The mood had darkened.

  It was as though something had fallen with a loud bang. A retired woman in the building across the street from the courthouse heard the sound and called the police. They discovered the sound had come from the roof, where someone had dropped a padlock. The police found a young man on the roof, and a lot of equipment: microphones, amplifiers, and four speakers large enough to blast the sound through the neighborhood, certainly large enough to make sure the windows of the courtroom across the narrow street shook. The police also found rock-climbing equipment.

  It would have been a spectacular action. Three women were going to descend the wall of the building, tethered to cables hung from the roof, wearing balaclavas and singing:

  In jail the state is stronger than time.

  The more arrests there are, the happier.

  Every arrest is a gift of love to the sexist

  Who has been pumping his cheeks the way he pumps his chest and his abs.

  But you can’t put us in a box.

  Overthrow the Chekists,[9] do it better and more often.

  Putin lights the fire of revolution.

  He is bored and frightened of silence.

  An execution to him is a rotten ashberry[10]

  And a long prison sentence a cause for nocturnal emissions.

  The country is on the march, marching in the streets with nerve,

  The country is on the march, marching to say go
od-bye to the regime,

  The country is on the march, marching in feminist formation.

  And Putin is on the march, marching to say good-bye.

  Put the whole city in jail for May 6.[11]

  Seven years is not enough, give us eighteen.

  Ban screaming, libel, going outside,

  And take Lukashenko[12] to be your wife.

  It had been a beautifully prepared action. The song had been mastered ahead of time, so it would blast from the speakers as the women descended the wall. The three women had trained with experienced rock climbers, practicing on abandoned buildings outside of Moscow. And they had hauled all that equipment up on the roof during the night. And Petya had told Pussy Riot’s international supporters to expect a big surprise after the sentencing, and his contact people had told everyone else. Some people thought this meant Pussy Riot would be released an hour or two after the sentencing.

  But then someone had dropped a padlock.

  PART 3

  Punishment

  TEN

  Kat

  “THE DRIVE BACK after the sentencing was very strange. It was an open prisoner transport, the first time we had an open one.” Kat made it sound like they were taken back to jail in a convertible. It was just a prisoner transport with plain windows: no dark film, no curtains. It was a rambling old bus with the three of them and several special forces officers in riot gear inside. They could see the city and breathe its dusty summer air. Nadya was agitated, and one might have thought she felt happy. Maria had an emotionless air about her. She said, “That’s that,” as though she had expected this all along, which she had not. Kat felt angry. She cursed Putin and the patriarch. It was like she had nothing to lose—and neither did the special forces guys, who failed to reprimand her; one of them asked to have his picture taken with the three of them. They got to the jail. Nadya hugged Kat, then Maria, then Kat again. That was that.